That's it, like
a light on
or a light off,
like that tree glorying
in the damp
coolness out there-
you know how
they mysteriously
brighten in the rain-
then shedding, still
glorious,
while I sweat it
out inside
then boom
the tree
is indistinguishable
from the others,
the yard, the gray
sky, leaf
rot, no
longer standing
out.

Dana Roeser grew up in the Philadelphia area and was educated at Tulane University (B.A.), the University of Virginia (M.A., M.F.A.), and the University of Utah. Her poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, Another Chicago Magazine, Northwest Review, Pool, Shade, and others, as well as on Poetry Daily. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Ragdale Foundation. She teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis and lives with her husband and two daughters in West Lafayette, Indiana. Ellen Bryant Voigt teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She is the author of six books of poems: Claiming Kin, The Forces of Plenty, The Lotus Flowers, Two Trees, Kyrie, and Shadow of Heaven, as well as a collection of essays on poetic craft, The Flexible Lyric.